September 8th, 2013 | by VoiceCouncil

Create Fan2Fan Connections

Once you’ve got a following, it’s time to strengthen it –says Alicia Yaffe

Understand that social media is about community. Your relationship with your fans will be stronger if they can connect with each other around your music.

This fan-to-fan connection will keep them loyal and add further value to your brand.

Encourage Meet-ups

Consider a couple who are dating because they met each other through an artist’s platform. Their bond with the artist is really strengthened.

The more that you can facilitate relationships being built between fans, the more your social media presence will grow and become self-sustaining.

At the same time you can stay slightly out of reach – that gives your presence an inspirational quality.

Once you have the community of believers – you can drop in and it is the highlight of their life – but what keeps it going are the friends that they have made.

Ways to Build The Fan-to-Fan Connection

There are many ways to nurture a fan-to-fan connection: through “meet and greets”, hangouts, invitations for people to submit fan videos, and contests.

All of these activities can lead to fans sharing what they do on your site with their friends.

This means that they are bringing pre-existing relationships into the community where they can also have a shared experience of your art.

I find it interesting that when some of our artists announce a contest winner, the community will write in their congratulations.

Instead of feeling bad that they didn’t win, they participate in the good feelings of the winner.

All of this is interaction that doesn’t require an huge investment from you as the artist, but it does require you to think through the best ways to have your fans connect with each other.

-Alicia Yaffe

Alicia Yaffelaunched The Spellbound Group in 2011 to execute unique campaigns for bands and brands to build sustainable markets. Alicia applies her years of expertise as the chief architect behind the integrated marketing department at Rocket Science, where she directed social media campaigns, digital sales initiatives, and on-and-off-line events to build successful campaigns for her clients at The Spellbound Group.More about Alicia Yaffe